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flowerbeater

328 karma · joined August 20, 2010

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flowerbeater··on ACM Makes Thousands of Research Articles Freely Available; Opens First 50 Years
What if you needed to link to a paper on your company's website? You'd link to sci-hub?
flowerbeater··on We’re winding down Google Talk
Or Google Buzz!
flowerbeater··on Challenge: Pixel perfect design
> Even at the larger sizes, a vector won't always look great. If the renderer doesn't fudge vector edges to snap to pixel edges, you'll end up with blurry edges instead of clean, sharp ones.

Do you have an example? Text is essentially "vector" these days, and I've never heard of anyone complaining that text rendered on a modern screen has blurry edges. The blurriness of some text is often "cleartype" or whatever tricks are being used to make it look better on low-dpi screens, which end up making it worse on modern displays.

flowerbeater··on Challenge: Pixel perfect design
Why do you think so? 20 years ago, everything was clearly in 1X. Now, the Windows default for many resolutions is 1.5X and my Macbook is 2X by default. iPhones and Androids are at least 2X scaled by default. iPhones in the last 2 years (like iPhone 12 and 13 are scaled 3X. So we've gone from 1X only, to 2X pretty much everywhere for desktop, with 3X on the latest phones.
flowerbeater··on Challenge: Pixel perfect design
Pixel art is a fun retro hobby, but as the article acknowledges, "we create work for high-resolution HDR screens." Icons, logos, and illustrations in general should be vector-first, so they will show up cleanly on HiDPI and in the future, 4X or 8X DPI interfaces. Too many icons and logos (even the Y on the top left here in HN) look blurry on a simple 4K monitor with 200% scaling (which is not uncommon now).
flowerbeater··on Low economic growth is a slow-burning crisis for Britain
There's also an academic capital, New England (Boston), with Harvard, MIT, Yale, Brown, and two dozen top liberal arts colleges.
flowerbeater··on EU to make it mandatory to use customer-replaceable batteries in household items
Wouldn't the manufacturers just take over, and only survive in the lowest cost place for manufacturing? The inventors/designers would get nothing and no one would want to do that anymore. What would be the incentive to share your open sourced designs?

Like it'd be pretty easy for one state-supported giant manufacturer to just build every single open sourced product, and sell it direct. The whole world would buy from this cheapest producer. No one else would get anything, and supply chains would become even more brittle.

Another way to think about it is if knockoffs were guaranteed identical to the originals, but at a lower price. Everyone would just buy the knockoffs. No one would want to make anything new anymore.

flowerbeater··on Some thoughts on undergraduate expansion (2021)
Seeing the amount 50k written out like that today, it seems like a pretty good deal. It looks like less the amount of annual equity that an entry level software developer makes. It's the price of a used truck, a kitchen remodel, a really nice family vacation for a month, etc.
flowerbeater··on Tech journalism is less diverse than tech (2020)
I think the fundamental question that everyone avoids answering is whether it's possible to tell race from appearance.

If the answer is yes, then there should be some specific unspoken criteria that exists, so what are they?

If no, then how do people tell whether a panel is diverse, or a class or company is diverse, when it's not self-reported?

flowerbeater··on The wealthiest 10% of Americans own a record 89% of all U.S. stocks
I've heard this trope before, but it doesn't seem true to me. The federal government's day-to-day services include universities (through student loans and grant funding), travel (domestic and international), the quality of food we eat, healthcare regulation, and nearly everything to do with employment.

The local governments seem to focus mostly on K-12 schools, and police/fire; plus some one-off errands like the DMV and liquor laws.

The amount of federal taxes I pay is a life-changing amount if I were to get it back in a single check every year, whereas the state/city taxes of sales+property+stateincome is maybe a quarter as much.

flowerbeater··on Economic costs of war
The employer pays the same social security and medicare taxes as the employee and also has a cap on the social security part, plus in some cases an unemployment tax.

If you want to include employer taxes, to calculate if the employer wants to pay you 250K how much you would get, then it's be about 42%. At 100K, it'd be about 38% since you don't reach the SS cap.

Of course, there's a couple other tricks in there, like the government can embed some tax into the healthcare costs which are required for employers to buy, but then there's also deductions that are hard to turn into a percentage like this.

flowerbeater··on Economic costs of war
The 37% and 13.3% are on marginal income, as I'm sure you know. The effective tax rate is much lower.

California and some other states also have required disability insurance that is taken out with the state income tax. It's 1% in CA.

And I would count Social Security and Medicare too, equally 7.65%. But the SS part has a cap so the percentage goes down the more you make.

All put together, someone making $250K pays about 37% on that to various income taxes listed above. If you were making 1M income a year, that rises to 47%. For 100K, it's about 30%.

flowerbeater··on The death of the ‘Millionaire Next Door’ dream
But there's a survivor bias in picking US blue chips. Wouldn't it make more sense to look at the rate of return for equity markets around the world? For example, the Japanese blue chip stock market has been stagnant.
flowerbeater··on Why we should end the data economy
I feel like there should be more outcry for credit bureaus and ISPs having even more life-affecting information than what is listed.
flowerbeater··on Show HN: Second-Chance Pool
Yeah that's totally understandable. I'm not advocating for removing/demoting major media stuff or bumping up obscure sites, not even saying anything about the scoring algorithm should change.

Rather I think obscure sites should get more opportunities to be organically upvoted on (and if they don't get voted up, then fine) and not just fall off /new after a few hours only to be seen by a few people. The BigCo stuff naturally gets posted often several (different) links from different people, whereas obscure stuff is only posted by a single person once. So this is about evening the odds.

flowerbeater··on Show HN: Second-Chance Pool
Yes I agree. Like original content takes a lot of work to produce, and could get an extra chance by default. Whereas news articles, tweets, and content from large tech companies have their own promotional campaigns.

I'd rather have eclectic ideas and projects from HN users not be overlooked (thus encouraging more of such content), and am less worried about GAFAM announcements, CNBC/Axios/BBC news, or things already popular on Twitter/Reddit.

Would this be a doable change to try?

flowerbeater··on Lambda School lays off 65 employees
Looks like you made a calculation error or misunderstood your units. A credit hour is 3 hours of work, as a credit hour is "(1) One hour of classroom or direct faculty instruction and a minimum of two hours of out of class student work each week for approximately fifteen weeks for one semester or trimester hour of credit, or ten to twelve weeks for one quarter hour of credit, or the equivalent amount of work over a different amount of time"

So it's 2,700 hours for a 4-year degree, versus 960 hours in Lambda School, just using your method of calculation. It's also not counting the internships or summer programs that students in 4-year schools usually partake in. And it does not count extracurriculars during the schoolyear, like hackathons, interview preparation, programming competitions, student group projects, etc. Finally, you're assuming that an entire half of a college degree is geneds, which is really not the case. It's more like 1/4 geneds, 1/2 required major/concentration courses, 1/4 electives which many students opt to take technical courses in. So probably more like 3,200 (minimum) to 5,000 hours in a 4-year college.

flowerbeater··on An Update on the UMN Affair
There's a wide range of degrees between "unfoolable" and "can be done by a persistent student". I think the impression (at least my impression) used to be is that it was possible before but quite unlikely without state-level efforts, but now we understand a properly advised student can get most of their attempted vulnerabilities inserted.
flowerbeater··on An Update on the UMN Affair
This is a reasonable and balanced analysis of the situation. In retrospect, it seems like the reversion of the 190 patches was an overreaction that ended up causing a lot of confusion: many people even on HN misinterpreted the comments on reversions to believe that bad patches were committed to the source tree or to stable.

But besides the lesson that one ought not to be deceptive with submitting patches, is also the lesson that the kernel is not as well reviewed as one may hope and with some effort, it's certainly possible to add an undetected vulnerability. I think that's probably one thing that led to the drama, is that the fundamental trust and work of the kernel was attacked, and the maintainers felt the need to fight back to protect their reputation.

flowerbeater··on Being kind to others is good for your health
In my life, this was an aggressive employee we hired who was not performing but also passive-aggressive to everyone, and at the beginning we were obligated to give them the benefit of the doubt (due to their explanations that they're struggling with the pandemic, civil unrest, family emergency, elections).

Then even after gathering evidence of their poor performing, they will just keep arguing their case, and would protest to everyone who will listen, and pit people against each other. They will claim they never knew those things were their responsibilities, that they were working hard on it, and that they were just about to address the performance issues, etc.

flowerbeater··on Ask HN: CS Researchers, why did you choose your subfield and niche?
I'd be a little careful with your one-line dismissals of fields. Each field has hundreds of people dedicating their entire lives into it. It'd be offensive to them that someone who hasn't even done any research to think they can judge an entire field like that. Imagine a high school student who took a community college course and saying "University juniors don't know anything. I discovered that they just copy from Wikipedia." The advice in this thread is a great starting point.
flowerbeater··on Is WebP really better than JPEG?
I think it's just about to take off. Browser support across the board is coming by the end of the year. PNG also took a while to become fully supported, so we just need some patience.
flowerbeater··on Is WebP really better than JPEG?
Not for me. I'm in the United States in an urban area and mobile data is 1 cent per megabyte (my provider is Google Fi). Decoding is nearly pretty fast for me, but the time for page elements to download is in the seconds (not even milliseconds). And if there's any low signal (wifi or mobile data), then over 10 seconds is not uncommon.
flowerbeater··on Modern universities are an exercise in insanity (2018)
Just curious, do you think what you paid is the actual cost to provide you that education?
flowerbeater··on Small farms in New York are experiencing a surprising boom
Seems a bit low. Isn't a drink already $7 a beer, or $12 a cocktail there? That's $10 and $15 with tax+tip respectively, leaving very little for the entree plus appetizer...
flowerbeater··on Why Restaurants Are So Fucked
I don't buy this. At a fast food chain, drinks are $1 with free refills. A burger is $3 for the fancy ones, $1 for the dollar menu ones. The windows also have all sorts of 4 for $4 or $5 value meal deals. So $5 without any coupons at Wendy's. Two people can eat for $6 if you use a coupon.

Ruby Tuesday burgers are $9.50 with fries. Add a soda, tip, tax, and it's $16. The multiple is still 3-4x.

flowerbeater··on Japan's PM to ask all schools to temporarily close
Just wondering, were you able to get a refund of the paid expenses?
flowerbeater··on Release Notes for Safari Technology Preview 98
Still no webp support? Safari is about to become out of date.
flowerbeater··on The rise (and rise) of the healthcare administrator
Exactly. It's also due to our inability to give straight up answers to questions like, What is the value of a human life? How does that value vary depending on age? What is the worth of an extra month of life? How should we decide where limited medical resources go?

Without straight answers to these, every bad story becomes a mob outcry for more regulation.

flowerbeater··on Restaurants are figuring out how to do without servers
Not saying that paywall complaints are okay, but just because YCombinator decrees it so, doesn't mean that we can't offer an opinion about something. If Hacker News instituted put in the FAQ that links to blogs was not okay and no discussion is allowed, that doesn't mean we shouldn't complain about it if we think it's bad for the site.
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